Surrendered—The Sacred Art

Rami Shapiro

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To live the surrendered life—a life no longer centered on control and hence no longer at odds with the ordinary suffering of everyday living. Rabbi Rami closely examines the first three steps of Twelve-Step recovery to help us cut through the denial, illusions, and falsehoods that bind us in our fight with addictions of all kinds. He draws upon his half-century engagement with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Islam, as well as his own and other people’s struggles in Twelve-Step recovery, to guide us in our awakening to reality’s freedom and the path to living joyously and well.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Développement personnel
• développement personnel
• Self-help
• Personal Growth

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781684421930
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Surrendered
- the sacred art
Shattering the Illusion of Control and Falling into Grace with Twelve-Step Spirituality
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
Copyright 2019 Rami Shapiro
Surrendered-The Sacred Art
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to Turner Publishing Company, 4507 Charlotte Avenue, Suite 100, Nashville, Tennessee, [phone], fax [phone], E-mail: [e-mail] .
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Cover design: Maddie Cothren
Book design: Tim Holtz
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request
9781594736438 Paperback
9781684421923 Hardcover
9781684421930 eBook
Printed in the United States of America
17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my grandson, Jack
Knowledge is better than ritual; Meditation is better than knowledge; Best of all is surrender which brings with it peace. -Bhagavad Gita 12.12
CONTENTS
Preface
Living Surrendered, a Preview
Introduction
P ART O NE
W E A DMITTED W E W ERE P OWERLESS O VER O UR A DDICTION -T HAT O UR L IVES H AD B ECOME U NMANAGEABLE
Chapter 1
You Are the Problem
Chapter 2
I Gotta Be Me
Chapter 3
Stop Me ing
Chapter 4
The Tao of You
Chapter 5
Being Powerless
Chapter 6
Yes, And
Chapter 7
Rock Bottom
P ART T WO
W E C AME TO B ELIEVE T HAT A P OWER G REATER T HAN O URSELVES C OULD R ESTORE O UR S ANITY
Chapter 8
Came to Believe
Chapter 9
A Power Greater than Ourselves
Chapter 10
Glimpsing the Unglimpseable
Chapter 11
Purpose
Chapter 12
Beyond Happiness
P ART T HREE
W E M ADE THE D ECISION TO T URN O UR W ILL AND O UR L IVES O VER TO THE C ARE OF G OD AS W E U NDERSTOOD H IM
Chapter 13
God as We Understood God
Chapter 14
The Eternal Tao
Chapter 15
Your Will, Your Life
Chapter 16
Being Nobody
Chapter 17
God s Care, God s Grace
Chapter 18
Letting Go of Deciding
Chapter 19
Living Surrendered
P ART F OUR
T HE S URRENDERED L IFE
Chapter 20
Serenity
Chapter 21
Freedom of Imperfection
Chapter 22
Inner Seeing
Chapter 23
Forgiveness
Chapter 24
Humility
Conclusion
There Is Nothing You Can Do, and Only You Can Do It
Invitations
Monk Begging for Food
Just Sitting
Passage Meditation
Neti-Neti
Third-Step Prayer
Who Is This Aliveness I Am?
Ens
Acknowledgments
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
About the Author
PREFACE
T he Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti is famous for saying Truth is a pathless land. The reason truth is pathless is that truth is here, now. It is reality, what the Taoists call the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows of everyday life. You don t travel to find reality because you are already immersed in it. You need not travel to find truth either. All you must do is live the reality arising around and within you in each moment. And this again is why truth is pathless. No path can lead you to where you already are, therefore any path you take to find truth can only lead you away from it.
The same can be said of recovery. Let me explain. We tend to speak of recovery as a destination: a place we arrive at by following a path away from our addictions. Even the notion of the Twelve Steps, with which this book is intimately concerned, reinforces that idea: as if we might take a step, make a change, then another, and progress to a place where we are free of our addictions and their distorting, disfiguring influence, a place where our true selves will finally be recovered.
Nonsense.
There is nowhere you can go where you will not find yourself and all your complex yearnings, and no path you can take away from here and now. But this is not an invitation to despair. It is an affirmation of freedom emerging from the realization that there is nowhere to go, no one to be, and nothing to change, a freedom that comes with a radical acceptance of and being surrendered to what is.
This realization, this being surrendered, isn t under your control.
Surrender is not a matter of will but of grace; not a matter of jiriki (Japanese for self-power ) but tariki (Japanese for other-power ). This is why I prefer to talk about being surrendered rather than surrendering. Surrendering is a willful choice to move from addiction to recovery, something I believe you cannot do. Being surrendered is being free from the false binary of addiction/recovery, being free from the fantasy that you may choose between them, and even from the fantasy that there is a you to do the choosing.
Which is why this isn t a self-help book but a self-helpless book. It is a book for the self exhausted by the effort to escape addiction, by the effort to follow a path from here and now to there and then, and by the effort to become a self instead of being Self. This book removes the illusion that any such path exists or that following it would be a good idea.
This book doesn t tell you how to get surrendered but rather points out that you already are surrendered, though you may be doing your best to deny and resist it. This book explores what is true when you are surrendered, and what it is like living surrendered, and does so in hopes that you will see that being surrendered is what is already so.
Don t read this book to be other than you are; read it and discover you are already other than you take yourself to be.
This is my second book on Twelve-Step spirituality, the first being Recovery-The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice . The previous book is the broader of the two, dealing as it does with a close reading of each of the Twelve Steps originally formulated by Bill W. This book is narrower in its focus, with its primary emphasis placed on the first three steps. You need not read Recovery-The Sacred Art to understand this book-each book operates independently of the other-but you may find that this book leads you to the other if you find yourself drawn to a broader and more interspiritual investigation into the theory and practice of Twelve-Step spirituality.
My concern in this book is with Steps One, Two, and Three:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.
I focus on these steps not simply because they are central to the process of recovery but because they are the foundation of Twelve-Step spirituality. A deep understanding of the first three steps is essential if you are to recognize that what Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith gave us in 1935 was not merely a way of engaging with alcoholism but a spiritual practice on par with any other.
My own reading of these steps widens their concern beyond alcoholism or any named addiction: you aren t merely powerless over this or that substance or behavior but over life itself. The discovery made possible with the first three steps is that not only can t you control your thoughts, feelings, and behavior, but you also can t control the thoughts, feelings, or behavior of anyone else either. Because control is impossible, your addiction to control is an exercise in a futility masked by addictive behaviors such as drinking, drugging, eating, and the rest. It s not that your life has become unmanageable, it s that life itself is unmanageable-so unmanageable, in fact, that you cannot even willfully turn your life over to God or any other higher power.
This understanding of the first steps is designed to make it unavoidably plain that you are not in control, and it is only when you have accepted this reality that you can learn to live without control. And so this is not a book about how to gain control through the Twelve Steps but how to live wisely and well without the need for control.
This book is written in a stone-skimming style. Think of each chapter as a flat stone skipping off the surface of a placid pond, and the space between paragraphs as the stone flying through the air before it makes contact with the pond to skip once more. While the laws of physics determine just where the stone will skim the water, there is no way for you or me to know exactly where that will be. This gives stone skimming and this book a somewhat improvisational feel.
As we shall see, improvisation is at the heart of what it is to be surrendered. As in improvisational theater, you have no control over the situation in which you find yourself. Your job isn t to control the situation or the other players but to say yes, and to whatever is happening around and with you. Saying yes is accepting the reality of what is so at this